Patricia Waller calls
her new exhibition „Bad Luck“. Bad luck in­deed! The falling flower pot struck
an unsuspecting head, a dog got his head stuck in a food can, another one was
flattened by an oversized bone. But not all of the objects depict cases of
merely passive bad luck, a lot exhibit a very active malice: Miss Piggy stuck
in the meat grinder, Bambi hacked to pieces, Bugs Bunny speared by an enormous
fork, Tweety in the soup, the cut-off thumbs of thumb-sucker Conrad. The
figures in these works – anthropomorphized animals – span a historic selection,
from fairy tales to the 19th-century Struwwelpeter (Slovenly
Peter) and fur­ther to modern comics and Disney creatures. All, however,
experi­ence violence, and a lot of blood is shed. Waller’s crocheted fig­ures
raise discomforting questions regarding the way our society deals with
violence: the violence we experience, the violence we exert, and the violence
we love to consume. The viewer is torn between malevolent gloating over the
misfortunes of others and empathy, between the pleasures of destruction – who
hasn’t wished for the wolf to finally devour Little Red Riding Hood? – and
compassion for these symbols of the helplessness we all experi­ence in the face
of destiny. The nature of the depicted violence as internal and controlled by
our drives is indicated by the impassive faces of the tortured creatures. Like
in comic strips and cartoons, they rise again in a Sisyphus-like manner after
each catastrophe, only to face the next inevitable disaster, pitilessly to the
tune of that old maxim: “The show must go on.”